Many people are affected by motion sickness, whether resulting from being at sea (e.g., on a ship, submarine, diving, etc.), from flying, from driving, or even in other circumstances. Motion sickness can be debilitating, resulting in nausea, vomiting and preventing people from carrying out their tasks as planned, whether it be continuing to carry out operations on a submarine, continuing to safely operate a plane, or continuing to enjoy a dive. As described in greater detail in U.S. Pat. No. 5,966,680 (the “'680 patent”), motion sickness results from a mismatch between what motions a person sees happening, and what motions that person internally perceives. Motion sickness can result from a motion felt but not seen, a motion seen but not felt, or different types or amounts of motions being felt and seen. For example, an individual in a ship sees indications of a certain motion or lack thereof in the ship (e.g., the person is in the same reference frame as the objects he sees), but that individual's vestibular system perceives a different motion (e.g., motion of the ship, yawing, pitching or rolling as a whole). Hence, there is a need for enabling a means to compensate for the sensory mismatch leading to motion sickness.
One method for compensating a sensory mismatch, as described in the '680 patent, is a wearable accessory providing visual orientation cues to reflect motion of the user with respect to the environment, in order to train the user's brain to correct the sensory mismatch, i.e. to correct what the user perceives. In an alternative embodiment, the '680 patent displays no visual cues, but records an image and averages it with other images so as to produce what is perceived by the user to be a slowly changing display of the visual environment, projected onto glasses, effectively minimizing the magnitude of any observed movement. Yet, such a device and its visual cues require additional user training and user experience to enable users to properly account for cues to alleviate the effects caused by sensory mismatches.
Accordingly, there remains a need to provide persons subject to the adverse effects of sensory mismatch with systems, methods, and devices that more naturally and readily enable a user to overcome perception mismatches leading to such adverse effects.